By VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Sunday, May 12, 1968

For a number of years Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera have been living in the resort town of
Montreux at the eastern end of Lake Geneva. They occupy all the rooms overlooking the lake from the
sixth floor, with one additional room on the far side of the corridor, recently rented for overflow books.
When he is interviewed, Mr. Nabokov prefers to receive the questions in writing and respond in kind, a
practice he followed here.

How do you work and relax?

After waking up between six and seven in the morning, I write till ten-thirty, generally at a lectern which
faces a bright corner of the room instead of the bright audiences of my professorial days. The first half-
hour of relaxation is breakfast with my wife around eight-thirty, and the creaming of our mail. One kind of
letter that goes into the wastepaper basket at once, with its enclosed stamped envelope and my picture, is
the one from the person who tells me he has a large collection of autographs (Somerset Maugham, Abu
Abdul, Karen Korona, Charles Dogson Jr., etc.) and would like to add my name, which he misspells.
Around eleven, I soak for 20 minutes in a hot bath, with a sponge on my head and a wordsman’s worry in
it, encroaching, alas, upon the nirvana. A stroll with my wife along the lake is followed by a frugal lunch
and a two-hour nap, after which I resume my work until dinner at seven. An American friend gave us a
Scrabble set in Cyrillic alphabet, manufactured in Newtown, Conn.; so we play skrebl for an hour
or two after dinner. Then I read in bed—periodicals or one of the novels that proud publishers
optimistically send us. Between eleven and midnight begins my usual fight with insomnia. Such are my
habits in the cold season. Summers I spend in the stumbling pursuit of lepidoptera on flowery slopes and
mountain screes; and, of course, after my daily hike of fifteen miles or more, I sleep even worse than in
winter. My last resort in this business of relaxation is the composing of chess problems. The recent
publication of two of them (in the Sunday Times and The Evening News of London) gave me more
pleasure, I think, than the printing of my first poems half a century ago in St. Petersburg.

What about your social circle?

The tufted ducks and crested grebes of Geneva Lake. The characters in my new novel. My sister Elena in
Geneva. A few friends in Lausanne and Vevey. A steady stream of brilliant American intellectuals
visiting me in the riparian solitude of a beautifully reflected sunset. A Mr. Van Veen who travels down
from his mountain chalet every other day to meet a dark lady whose name I cannot divulge, on a street that
I glimpse from my mammoth-tusk tower. Who else? A Mr. Vivian Badlook.

Why did you recently drop your publisher?

Nabokov produced an index card with the following answer, which he reads to long-distance phone
inquiries of a similar kind: “Putnam’s position was that Mr. Nabokov was much too good a writer to fuss
about such sordid trifles as more money for more books and Mr. Nabokov’s position was that no matter
how good he was he should get enough money to buy pencil sharpeners and support his family. It was the
clash of two philosophies, one—Putnam’s—idealistic, the other—Natokov’s—practical.”

How do you feel about your work?

My feelings about my work are, on the whole, not unfriendly. Boundless modesty and what people call
“humility” (the same people who use such journalistic metaphors as the atrocious “dialogue”) are virtues
scarcely conducive to one’s complacently dwelling upon one’s own work—particularly when one lacks
them. I see it segmented into four stages. First comes meditation (including the accumulation of
seemingly haphazard notes, the secret arrowheads of research); then the actual writing, and rewriting, on
special index cards that my stationer orders for me: “special” because those you buy here come lined on
both sides, and if, in the process of writing, a blast of inspiration sweeps a card onto the floor, and you pick
it up without looking, and go on writing, it may happen—it has happened—that you fill in its underside,
numbering it, say, 107, and then cannot find your 103 which lurks on the side used before. When the fair
copy on cards is ready, my wife reads it, checking it for legibility and spelling, and has it transferred onto
pages by a typist who knows English; the reading of galleys is a further part of that third stage. After the
book is out, foreign rights come into play. I am trilingual, in the proper sense of writing, and not only
speaking, three languages (in that sense practically all the writers I personally know or knew in America,
including a babel of paraphrasts, are strictly monolinguists). “Lolita” I have translated myself into Russian
(recently published in New York by Phaedra, Inc.); but otherwise I am able to control only the French
translations of my novels. That process entails a good deal of wrestling with booboos and boners, but on
the other hand allows me to reach my fourth, and final, stage—that of re-reading my book a few months
after the original printing. What judgment do I then pronounce? Am I still satisfied with my work? Does
the afterglow of achievement correspond to the foreglow of conception? It should and it does.

What is your attitude to the modern world?

I doubt if we can postulate the objective existence of a “modern world” on which an artist should have any
definite and important opinion. It has been tried, of course, and even carried to extravagant lengths. A
hundred years ago, in Russia, the most eloquent and influential reviewers were left-wing, radical utilitarian
political critics, who demanded that Russian novelists and poets portray and sift the modern scene. In
those distance times, in that remote country, a typical critic would insist that a literary artist be a “reporter
on the topics of the day,” a social commentator, a class-war correspondent. That was half-a-century before
the Bolshevist police not only revived the dismal so-called progressive (really regressive) trend
characteristic of the eighteen-sixties and seventies, but, as we all know, enforced it. In the old days, to be
sure, great lyrical poets or the incomparable prose artist who composed “Anna Karenin” (which should be
transliterated without the closing “a” —she was not a ballerina) could cheerfully ignore the left-wing
progressive philistines who requested Tyutchev or Tolstoy to mirror politico-social soap-box gesticulations
instead of dwelling on an aristocratic love affair or the beauties of nature. The dreary principles, once
voiced in the reign of Alexander II, and their subsequent sinister transmutation into the decrees of gloomy
police states (Kosygin’s dour face expresses that gloom far better than Stalin’s dashing moustache) come to
my mind whenever I hear today retro-progressive book reviewers in America and England plead for a little
more social comment, a little less artistic whimsy. The accepted notion of a “modern world” continuously
flowing around us belongs to the same type of abstraction as, say, the “quaternary period” of paleontology.
What I feel to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage, which
becomes a new mir (“world” in Russian) by the very act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives
in. My mirage is produced in my private desert, an arid but ardent place, with the sign No Caravans
Allowed on the trunk of a lone palm. No doubt, good minds exist whose caravans of general ideas lead
somewhere — to curious bazaars, to photogenetic temples, but an independent novelist cannot derive much
true benefit from tagging along.

What then would be your politics?

Here again I would want to establish first a specific definition of the term politics, and that might mean
dipping again in the remote past. Let me simplify matters by saying that in my parlor politics as well as in
open-air statements (when subduing for instance, a glib foreigner who is always glad to join our domestic
demonstrators in attacking America, I content myself with remarking that what is bad for the Reds is good
for me. I will abstain from details (they might lead to a veritable slalom of qualificatory parentheses),
adding merely that I do not have any neatly limited political views or rather that such views as I have shade
off into a vague old-fashioned liberalism. Much less vaguely—quite adamantically, or even admantinely—
I am aware of a central core of spirit in me that flashes and jeers at the brutal farce of totalitarian states,
such as Russia, and her embarrassing tumors, such as China. A feature of my inner prospect is the absolute
abyss yawning between the barbed-wire tangle of police states and the spacious freedom of thought we
enjoy in America and Western Europe.

How does this attitude reflect itself in your views about contemporary literature?

I am bored by writers who join the social-comment racket. I despite the corny philistine fad of flaunting
four-letter words. I also refuse to find merit in a novel just because it is by a brave black in Africa or a
brave white in Russia—or by any representative of any single group in America. Frankly, a national
folklore, class, Masonic, religious, or any other communal aura involuntarily prejudices me against a novel,
making it harder for me to peel the offered fruit so as to get at the nectar of possible talent. I could name,
but will not, a number of modern artists whom I read purely for pleasure, and not for edification. I find
comic the amalgamation of certain writers under a common label of, say, “Cape Codpiece Resistance” or
“Welsh Working-Upperclass Rehabilitation” or “New Hairwave School.” Incidentally I frequently hear the
distant whining of people who complain in print that I dislike the writers whom they venerate such
as Faulkner, Mann, Camus, Dreiser, and of course Dostoyevski. But I can assure them that because I detest
certain writers I am not impairing the well-being of the plaintiffs in whom the images of my victims
happen to form organic galaxies of estoem. I can prove, indeed, that the works of those authors really exist
independently and separately from the organs of affection throbbing in the systems of irate strangers.

Wouldn’t “Lolita” be considered square by today’s youth, who turn on with drugs instead of chewing gum?

Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write
for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce); as I have said often enough,
I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts.
Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read “Lolita,” or any of my books, some in fact cannot read at all.
Let me also observe that the term “square” already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than
conservative youth, nor is there anything more philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of
drug duncery. Half a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St. Petersburg was cocaine
sniffing combined with phony orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young American readers
are far removed from those juvenile fads and faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent
who got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by distributing drugs among them that he
became an addict himself and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic sloth. He must be
grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet if he has not yet lined the coat of his fortunate shepherd.